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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741762464 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 554,755 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mr Sin
The Abe Saffron Dossier
By Tony Reeves
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2007 Tony ReevesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-246-4
CHAPTER 1
FOR KING AND COUNTRY ... AND A QUICK QUID
Having Attended School with Frederick Charles Anderson — later nicknamed 'Paddles' and hailed as one of Sydney's earliest movers and shakers of organised crime — Abe Saffron had a headstart in life. At Fort Street Boys' High School in Petersham in Sydney's inner-west, Anderson was a few years ahead of young Abe, and he was possibly Abe's first — but certainly not last — brush with criminal fame. But let's start further back than that.
Sam Saffron had married Annie Gilbert in 1912. Of Russian–Jewish heritage, they set up home above their drapery store on Parramatta Road at Annandale in Sydney's inner-west. Abe, the fourth of five children, was born on Monday, 6 October 1919. Philip, Henry and Beryl were his older siblings; a sister Flora was born later. The business helped the family survive the economic hardships of the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Later, to help the family cash flow, Sam set up a black-market racket when clothes and popular items like nylon stockings were scarce and rationed during the Second World War. He made a tidy fortune out of it, some of which was later undoubtedly used to fund his son Abe's activities.
After school Abe always helped out in the shop, and from the age of about eight he operated a lucrative trade in black-market cigarettes. He had arranged a supply of these scarce items with a friendly local shopkeeper, and then resold at a profit to his father's friends, and later to Fort Street schoolmates. Reselling was a corporate skill he honed over a lifetime, eventually learning how to acquire the stock free of charge. At no stage in his life did he ever have the required permit to sell tobacco products. Another of Abe's early scams was buying textbooks from boys who no longer needed them, cleaning them up and selling them to those starting a new year. Selling books was another lifelong corporate activity, though the material he traded later in life was definitely unsuitable for young schoolboys. After making a good profit selling used books and black-market cigarettes, Saffron decided that the world of commerce needed his talents. Many years later he was to tell a journalist that he left school early because: '... I had no other desire than to go into business.'
In the mid-1930s the family drapery business moved into the city to a rented shop on Pitt Street. It was here that a nineteen-year-old Abe Saffron met American Hilton Glanville Kincaid, who had changed his surname by deed poll from Macossa. A twenty-one-year-old, Kincaid operated out of a tiny booth next to the Saffron shop, selling cigarettes and, from 'under the counter', any other scarce or rationed commodity he could supply illegally at rip-off prices. It was a similar line of business to Abe's really, and the two joined forces for many years.
Another venture to which young Saffron applied his 'corporate skills' was gambling. It seemed not to matter that his new business was illegal. Details are sketchy now, but on Monday, 19 September 1938, Saffron was summonsed to appear at North Sydney Magistrate's Court on a charge of using a premises for gambling. 'Guilty, Your Worship.' Fine: £5 ($343.81), or ten days' hard labour at Long Bay. Abe paid up promptly from his illicit profits. He either learned his lesson or learned discretion, or, more likely, invited the local cops into his illegal gambling club for a few free bets, as there are no more breaches of the gaming laws on Abe Saffron's notably sparse criminal record.
After a while he moved to a potentially more lucrative field: theft. He was twenty when he was hauled before the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Wednesday, 3 January 1940, on a charge of receiving stolen goods, to wit (as the police prosecutor intoned) a car radio worth £20 ($1309). 'Guilty, Your Worship.' He was sentenced to six months' hard labour. But the magistrate suspended the problem of actually sending him to prison by allowing him to enter a good behaviour bond for £10 on the assurance he would behave nicely for the next two years instead. There was also a mention by the magistrate that he might better serve his country by enlisting in the army and going to war rather than by stealing things.
Remarkably, the records show him back in the same court on the same day, facing four counts of receiving stolen goods and one of having stolen goods in custody. Unaccountably, the charges were dismissed under the versatile clause 556A of the Crimes Act, which allowed a magistrate to dismiss proven charges against a 'first offender'. And that was it for a while: a humble beginning for a man who would go on to make millions from criminal activities.
Years later, in the mid-1970s, when John Little, a reporter for the TV show A Current Affair, interviewed Saffron, Abe suffered that perennial ailment of the criminal classes: a sudden, brief but virulent attack of amnesia. The interview Little pre-recorded included a segment that went something like this:
Little: Do you have a criminal record?
Saffron: No.
Little: But our records show that you had a conviction for receiving many years ago. Was this so? Saffron: No.
Little: Then ourrecords are wrong?
Saffron: It comes back to me now. Yes, there was something like that.
Little: Was there anything else?
Saffron: No.
That recording was never put to air. Saffron's solicitors contacted the program producers and threatened legal action if there was any reference to his criminal record. So it was dropped.
Abe Saffron was a well-established entrepreneur and he was never going to allow his unsavoury biographical details to sully the public's mind that he was anything other than a highly successful, sometimes controversial, yet unquestionably charitable businessman. That was a gambit he maintained for the rest of his life. And some people still believe him.
As was the case with many aspiring young entrepreneurs in those days, a little event called the Second World War put the brakes on Abe's corporate ambitions. Called up for military service, he fronted at the army's Victoria Barracks in Oxford Street, Paddington, on Monday, 5 August 1940, to enlist in the Citizen Military Forces. He declared he was single, a draper and mercer, of British nationality (as were all Australians in those days), a Hebrew, and his next of kin was his mother, Annie, of 16 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi. He was allocated Army Number N21771 and sent off to be checked by a medical officer, F.E. Barclay, who sized him up as: five feet six inches (1.68 metres) tall, 136 pounds (61.68 kilograms) weight, grey eyes, dark hair and dark complexion. He passed the medical with flying colours, being declared 'fit for Class 1'. His slightly humped back — almost invisible under clothing — did not affect the medic's judgement.
Abe signed the pledge that he, Abraham Gilbert Saffron, would '... well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, in the military forces of the Commonwealth of Australia until the cessation of the present time of war or until sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed or removed ...', and so on. Lieutenant B. Fuller witnessed this solemnly sworn oath. Abe's reluctance to get involved in the war effort was only shown when he completed his personal details on the opening page of his Record of Service. Under 'If exemption claimed, reason' he wrote: 'My father's business is wholly dependent on my presence.' His attempt to opt out obviously did not convince the military brass, who had a war to win.
Abe's was not an inspiring military career. At the start of 1942 he was moved to the army camp at Liverpool and, within a week, he was in the hospital and out of action for a fortnight with an undisclosed ailment. Two years after he enlisted he was bumped up to the rank of corporal, but again the excitement of all this military action got to him: he was back in hospital and his fitness downgraded to 'Class B'. On Tuesday, 18 January 1944, after 733 days in the army (102 days of which he was not on active duty) and without medals, decorations or an active service badge, he signed Discharge Certificate 9831, gladly accepting the army's reason why they were letting him go as: 'There being no suitable vacancy in which his services could be employed.' Such a low-key recognition of his service did not prevent him in later years from proudly wearing on his lapel the RSL badge normally worn as an acknowledgement of overseas military service. He packed his bags and headed off to the family home, now at 27 Boonara Avenue, Bondi.
After his discharge, Abe's military wartime commitment was over, but he did perform a little more war-related activity with a six-month stint in the merchant navy from the end of January 1944, doing administrative chores on troopships on the Australian east coast. While on duty Saffron met up with his old mate Hilton Kincaid — the Pitt Street black marketeer who was still running a brisk trade in illicit booze and cigarettes. They both signed off at the end of a voyage in June 1944 — their war was now over — and decided to team up ashore, an ideal business partner, Abe must have thought. For this pair, it was time to make some money out of the war.
CHAPTER 2SLY GROG SALES: A BOTTLER OF A MONEY-MAKER
The War May have been over for Saffron in mid-1944, but there was another year to go for those actually fighting in the Pacific. Conveniently for Abe, in that year hordes of cashed-up American troops were either based in Sydney or visiting for leave breaks.
Canadian-born Sammy Lee first visited Australia in 1937 as a drummer in a band and returned for keeps in 1940 when he opened the Roosevelt nightclub at 32 Orwell Street, a block off the main drag in Kings Cross. Although breaking the liquor laws on a nightly basis, he became a highly popular and successful nightclub operator around Sydney for more than twenty years. His business partner for many years was a flamboyant gambler, Reginald Frederick 'Reg' Boom, who also operated illegal baccarat games in Double Bay and Kings Cross. Abe met Sammy Lee and Reg Boom at the Roosevelt club, and the pair agreed to pass the business over to Saffron, then aged twenty-three.
Saffron ran the club in partnership with his mate Hilton Kincaid and a much older man, Mendel Brunen. Brunen's parents, Elias and Rachel, had set up their son in a similar line of business as Abe's father — mercery and clothing — and Mendel was a neighbour and close Saffron family friend. Kincaid, as an American, helped attract the US soldiers as the club's main customers. Abe must have realised then that the nightlife of Kings Cross was where his fortune lay. As Mario Puzo wrote in his 1978 novel Fools Die: 'If you want to get rich in this country, you have to get rich in the dark.' The money started to roll in — but not for long. Before its first anniversary was celebrated, the club was closed by a court order declaring it a 'disorderly house'.
It appears certain that Abe's father Sam had asked Brunen to get involved with Abe's corporate adventures and to 'keep an eye' on how the money was used — much of which had undoubtedly been provided by Saffron senior. Brunen was to remain in that role until his death in 1965. Abe Saffron never spoke of the source of his startup funding; such revelations could have brought discredit to his father, who had made much of his fortune on the illegal wartime black market. But it was clear there was never a shortage of large lumps of cash.
From the early 1940s on, Abe always seemed to get what he wanted, even for his foray north from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. There he and his ever-present and equal partner Kincaid bought into their first hotels: a pub at Kurri Kurri and, about a year later in 1944, another, the Newcastle Hotel. They paid £3000 ($161,421) for the latter, but Abe refused — even years later when giving evidence under oath — to say where he got the money from, mumbling confused replies about 'saving it' and 'from winnings'.
Around this time Abe had a brief stint at being a legal bookmaker, but at this he failed after he made an abortive attempt to take over the local jockey club. Perhaps the sheer legality of these ventures brought about a lack of interest, or perhaps it was the lure of the 'big smoke' that drew Saffron and Kincaid back to Sydney early in 1946, where they took over the West End Hotel in Balmain. (Kincaid's involvement was not revealed because the licensing authorities had taken a dim view of his earlier illicit liquor business.) A few months later they acquired the licence of the Gladstone Hotel, about halfway up William Street, between Sydney's CBD and Kings Cross.
At the moment the second deal was signed, Saffron broke the law, which limited any individual to just one hotel licence. Abe knew that, of course, and went through a charade of transferring the licence of the West End pub — then worth around £5300 ($284,414) — to his eldest brother Philip to try to conceal the control of the business by himself and Kincaid. Philip moved into the pub for a while with his wife of ten years, Ruth Harriet, to put on a convincing show that he was the owner. It is, in retrospect, implausible that the Licensing Court and the police charged with enforcing the liquor laws would have been ignorant of this blatant breach for long. It was later revealed that from the earliest days of Saffron's booze business he was systematically and regularly corrupting the very police and officials charged with prosecuting such lawbreakers.
In that postwar period with its newfound sense of freedom and fun, the good citizens of Sydney had probably never heard the term 'organised crime' and, if they had, would have attributed it to the fascinating stories of the US Mafia they occasionally heard about. Few would have believed that here, in their own hometown, the building blocks of large-scale organised crime were being established by people like Abe Saffron and his running mates Hilton Kincaid and Mendel Brunen.
WHAT CONSTITUTES 'ORGANISED CRIME'?
In 1973, an Australian judge provided what was probably the first local definition of 'organised crime'. Under intense pressure in the parliament, NSW Premier Bob Askin had been forced to do something about mounting allegations of criminal activities under his watch. On Monday, 20 August 1973, Askin appointed respected judge Athol Randolph Moffitt to head a twelve-month royal commission into a range of crime allegations — an event in which Abe Saffron was given more than a passing mention.
Moffitt was to spend many pages of his 1974 report on seeking to define organised crime. It is not intended here to enter that discussion in great depth, replete as it is with the potential for unending academic conflict, but Moffitt suggested that investigation of organised crime should have two threads: one to determine if a crime had been committed and the other to determine whether the crime could be shown to be part of an organised pattern. 'For example', wrote the judge, 'bribery, blackmail or assault, in the course of a legitimate business gaining a monopoly, could be regarded as organised crime ...' He wrote that a weapon of organised crime is '... by planning to avoid generating evidence of its crimes, or if there is evidence, to suppress it by intimidation or corruption ... of officials, particularly those, such as police, charged with investigating organised crime'.
To avoid confusion, crimes defined in this book as 'organised' are those illegal acts that are planned as part of a continuing corporate strategy in which effort is made to conceal the existence of the crime and where officials charged with policing and prosecuting the breaches have, by bribery, blackmail or intimidation, been prevented from — or dissuaded from — carrying out their duties to investigate or prosecute the crimes. And that fits Abe Saffron's activities to a T.
There has long been police corruption in Australia, of course; that started with the arrival of the first white folk on these shores. In the early 1900s, Sydneysiders in particular were titillated from time to time by fantastic tabloid stories of sly grog shops, illegal SP bookies, vice queens and razor gangs. But organised crime was not considered to be a part of the Australian psyche. And so it would have remained if the organising criminals, their corrupt police and the shonky politicians had had their way. One of the basic tactics of organised crime, said Athol Moffitt (see box), is to try to conceal its existence. That is precisely what Saffron did with his Gladstone deal, and as he did time and again as he added new hotels to his chain.
There was a deafening silence from the liquor authorities when Saffron took over the Mortdale Hotel with his sister Beryl and mate Kincaid; the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown with Emil 'Eddie' Kornhauser (who was to become a long-term close friend); the Albert Hotel in North Sydney with brother Henry Saffron and Kincaid; and the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney. The fact that Saffron used his friends and family as 'dummies' to front his illegally gained hotel licences came out eventually.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mr Sin by Tony Reeves. Copyright © 2007 Tony Reeves. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author note,Prologue,
1 For king and country ... and a quick quid,
2 Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker,
3 In and out of court and courting crims,
4 New players join the team: Abe moves into the big time,
5 Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue puts crims in the black,
6 Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get out of hand,
7 Burning issues: murder and arson become the hot topics,
8 Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not so hard to break,
9 Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover,
10 Tax break comes Abe's way: whistleblower goes to jail,
11 Troubles in the south: truth drug may be the answer,
12 Rid me of these meddlesome attorneys: Abe plays Henry too,
13 Takeover bid: top cop seeks monopoly on graft payments,
14 Taxing times: Abe does a 'Capone' with little black books,
15 Courting a new persona: writs say the past is all a lie,
Epilogue: and then he died,
Notes,
Index,